In the lifecycle of modern production management, permanent downhole gauges (PDG) are used in monitoring well production. A PDG is deployed in the down hole in the well. It measures bottom-hole pressure versus time and the data are transmitted to the surface typically via cable. Because of the alien down-hole environment and the high-recording-frequency, the recorded pressure data is numerous and extremely noisy. Hence, only limited information can be extracted from the data.
FIG. 1 shows the conventional method of dealing with the enormous quantity of high-frequency pressure data recorded from PDG in a reservoir 10. There are two steps, on the left side of FIG. 1, step 1, the production data acquisition process (PDAP) 11 is shown. The PDAP is done automatically as the PDG records pressure continuously. The recorded data is referred as real time (RT) data. RT data can be stored automatically to the server and also be downloaded to the local personal computer (PC). The second step is the production data interpretation process (PDIP) 12 and is shown on the right side of FIG. 1. Typically, trained technical staff or experts have to perform the PDIP 12. After obtaining real-time data, the technical staff or experts manually determine the transient areas (build up area and draw down area, for example). The process is called transient detection. Once the transients are detected, the technical staff interprets the detected transients, based on the pressure data within the chosen transient areas and the flow rate history. From this interpretation, the technical staff determines formation parameters such permeability, well bore storage and skin, which will be deemed as inputs for history matching. Finally, the technical staff run model based history matching. By running history matching, the interpreted formation parameters can be improved to meet the pressure response in reservoir scale. In this step, a numerical simulator is applied. But this step cannot be implemented automatically, because the numerical simulation is always time-consuming and real time data is enormous. Finally, the improved parameters will be used to characterize the reservoir and guide the future production.
The present invention provides real time data collection, interpretation and modeling to provide real time characterization of reservoirs and provide accurate prediction of reservoir properties.